Why don't Americans take voting seriously?

The election results make me sad in a nonpartisan way when I think of how little most Americans take seriously the right to vote.

In the “most important midterm elections of our lifetime,” less than half of the eligible voters voted. We are supposed to be pleased that a little over 47 percent is an improvement over past shameful turnouts, but it is incredibly low compared to other democracies.

And it is clear that a goodly percentage of those who do vote do not put much effort into thinking about what they are doing. I am not talking about people with whose political viewpoints I disagree; I am talking about people who (regardless of beliefs) obviously vote without thinking about the qualifications of the candidates.

U.S. Rep. Dan Lipinski’s neo-Nazi opponent got 26 percent of the vote, a total not that much different than other Republican nominees had gotten in previous elections where there was a contest in that district. The neo-Nazi was disowned by the Republican Party and all the newspapers. So we have thousands of people who voted without the slightest curiosity about the candidate they were intending to send to Congress. Perhaps it was a protest vote by those who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Lipinski. Still, given the publicity, one would have hoped that the anti-Lipinski voters would have abstained or written in the name of a decent Republican.

As usual, the judicial ballot gives the clearest example of thoughtless voting. Yes, we finally managed to get rid of one exceptionally bad judge — and it took the opposition of his own party leadership, all the papers, and all the legitimate bar associations. Yet the majority of voters voted to retain Matthew Coghlan.

At the same time, roughly a quarter of voters voted “no” on several highly qualified judges supported by every organization that looked into their qualifications.

It is truly sad to think that half of all Americans care so little about their right to vote, and some of those who do vote apparently exercise that right in such a thoughtless and cavalier manner.